Monday, April 24, 2017

An expat friend emailed me from Brisbane last week. He had
read about Cyclone Cook hitting New Zealand and wondered whether, after all the
scary warnings, it had turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax.

I had to confirm that his impression was correct. Sure,
trees were brought down, some houses were evacuated, farms were flooded and
there were road closures, power outages and a few landslides.

The impact on those affected shouldn’t be understated. But
there was nothing like the mayhem that breathless weather forecasters (and I mean almost literally breathless, in some instances) had warned
us to brace ourselves for.

MetService should be conducting a rigorous self-appraisal
this week, because it greatly overplayed its hand. In doing so, it put its
credibility at risk. Some of the official predictions came perilously close to
scaremongering.

We were told there was a real risk the intensity of the
storm would match that of April 1968, when the Wahine foundered at the entrance
to Wellington Harbour with the loss of 51 lives. But the conditions then were
dissimilar in one vital respect.

It’s true that in 1968 a tropical cyclone, Giselle, passed down
the country, just as happened with Cyclone Cook. The crucial difference was
that it collided head-on over Cook Strait with a powerful front heading in the
other direction.

It wasn’t Giselle on its own that caused catastrophe, but
the violent clash of two opposing weather systems. Meteorologists must know this, so why create
the misleading impression that Cyclone Cook on its own was capable of
replicating Wahine conditions? It was wrong and it was irresponsible.

This isn’t to say MetService was wrong to issue warnings.
Clearly it would have been negligent not to advise the public to be prepared
for an extreme weather event. There would have been hell to pay if Cyclone Cook
had arrived without prior notice.

What’s at issue is the sensationalist tone of the warnings.
One over-excited forecaster pronounced that it would be a “national event” – no
ifs, buts or maybes – and said not many people would be spared.

This wasn’t a media beat-up. These were the exact words of
professional meteorologists.

In fact the impact turned out to be largely localised, and
not necessarily in the places predicted. Some of the predicted consequences,
such as damaging storm surges and coastal inundation, appear not to have
eventuated – or if they did, had little impact.

The Auckland Harbour Bridge stayed open and the Cook Strait
ferries continued running, contradicting expert predictions.

What’s also troubling is that the meteorologists showed no
inclination to moderate their forecasts even when it became apparent that they
might have over-egged the pudding. They seemed to be enjoying their moment in the spotlight.

When Cyclone Cook deviated from its expected path, one
forecaster pronounced that Auckland had “very luckily” been spared, but that
the worst was still to come. Well, we’re still waiting.

The Central Plateau and the Wairarapa were supposed to cop
it, but neither region did. I live in the Wairarapa and all that happened was
that we got a night of moderately heavy rain from an unusual direction.

Once the cyclone had passed over the country and drifted off
to wherever it is that ex-cyclones go, MetService went into damage control
mode. By that time it was getting some stick on social media; one joker posted
a photo on Facebook showing a plastic chair overturned by the wind on someone’s
back lawn as an example of the devastation wreaked.

A MetService spokesman, defending the forecasters, explained that tropical cyclones were
“fickle beasts which are hard to pin down”.Fair enough; we can all accept that forecasting is an
inexact science. But if cyclones are unpredictable, why so much certainty
before the event?

In fact I wonder if the whole business of meteorology and
forecasting is becoming a bit overheated, if you’ll excuse the pun. Fears of
global warming (real or otherwise), 24-hour weather channels, celebrity weather
presenters and constant warnings of extreme climatic events (hardly a week passes without one) all feed into this
phenomenon. But violent weather events have always been with us.

What should concern MetService is that its credibility took
a hit last week, not so much because of the accuracy of its forecasts but due
to the hyped-up, anxiety-inducing tone of its warnings.

It added to a deepening public scepticism toward “experts”. People
take note when weather forecasters give them a bum steer, just as they take
note when supposedly state-of-the-art, earthquake-proof buildings – designed by
experts – have to be abandoned after a moderate shake while decades-old
structures are undamaged.

People notice, too, that there’s a striking absence of
accountability for the harm done when experts get things wrong. But that’s a
subject for another day.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Remember the 60s? That was the decade when middle-class
baby-boomers rose up in defiance of their elders.

Nothing was sacred. Traditional morality was scorned and
conventional political values overturned as the protest generation stormed the
barricades of conformity.

Censorship became a hot-button issue as the conservative
establishment fought in vain to hold the line against a tsunami of liberalism
in films, literature, television and music.

At the heart of this cultural revolution were students,
vigorously pushing back the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in
terms of both behaviour and speech.

University campuses served as incubators for much of the
social and political liberalism that was to transform New Zealand society. The
same was true overseas, where student radicalism flourished from California’s
Berkeley to France’s Sorbonne.

How ironic, then, that many universities overseas have
become repressive environments where political debate is shut down and anyone
daring to challenge ideological orthodoxy is intimidated into silence.

At Cardiff University in 2015, students tried to ban
Germaine Greer – a stroppy feminist heroine of an earlier generation – from
giving a lecture.

Her crime? She had offended transgender people by suggesting
a man couldn’t become a woman simply by having surgery. For expressing this
“offensive” opinion, she was branded as transphobic.

Being Germaine Greer, she went ahead with her speech
regardless – and infuriated her critics even more by saying “I don’t believe a
woman is a man without a cock”. Police officers and security guards were on
hand to ensure her safety.

More recently, Berkeley University – the same Berkeley that
was a hotbed of student rebellion in the 1960s – cancelled a planned speech by
the provocative gay libertarian Milo Yiannopoulos after thousands of students
gathered to protest and black-clad “anti-fascist” activists threatened
violence.

Closer to home, three students from the Queensland
University of Technology were sued for “racial hatred” after posting online
comments objecting to their exclusion from an “indigenous only” computer lab.

One of the students had posted: “QUT stopping segregation
with segregation?” Another had asked: “I wonder where the white supremacist
computer lab is.” That was as racist as it got.

For this they were sued for $250,000. Fortunately a federal
judge put a stop to the nonsense when he ruled there was no case to answer.

The university’s indigenous administrative officer, who
brought the court action, linked the students to America’s Ku Klux Klan (now
there’s a truly defamatory statement) and said she couldn’t understand why they
hadn’t been suspended or disciplined.

In Britain, meanwhile, universities have created “safe
spaces” where students are protected from hearing opinions that might offend them,
and the National Union of Students has a “No Platform” policy which prevents
“racist or fascist” organisations from speaking at any student function.

Who defines racist and fascist? The NUS, presumably.

Another recent development in the United States is the
advent of “trigger warnings”, where lecturers are required to advise students
in advance of any material they might find upsetting. How fragile we’ve become.

As far as I know, we have had no direct parallels with the
above cases in New Zealand. But we have come perilously close.

Last month a group calling itself the Auckland University
European Students Association was forced to disband after an outbreak of moral
panic over its recruitment stand at Orientation Week. Someone alleged the group’s slogan, “Our honour is our pride
and our loyalty”, was similar to that of the Nazi SS.

I have no idea whether the group’s members were white
supremacists or whether, as a spokesman said, they merely wanted to promote
European culture. If it’s the latter, then they were no different from any
number of organisations wishing to celebrate their ethnic or cultural
heritage.

But we never really had a chance to find out, because the
association claimed it had to disband following abuse and threats of violence.

If that’s true, you have to wonder who poses the greater
threat – a small group of young men with a fondness for Celtic imagery which
some people found a bit creepy, or the self-appointed enforcers of cultural
correctness who intimidated them into folding their tent and melting away into the
night?

What’s going on here? Is this really what the student
radicals of the 1960s wanted? Did the bold liberalism of that era take a wrong
turning somewhere, eventually spawning a generation frightened of, and hostile
to, ideological diversity?

Or was the 60s revolution a bit of a fraud all along, the
real “liberal” agenda being to replace one form of bigotry and conformity with
another?

Part of the problem is that an overwhelmingly left-leaning
academic establishment (one leading American academic calls it an “intellectual
monoculture”) has promoted a type of groupthink that is intolerant of dissent.

The irony, of course, is that today’s speech police are the
direct ideological descendants of those 1960s radicals. Only now they are in
control, and seeking to impose a type of censorship that’s just as prudish and
po-faced as anything from that supposedly oppressive era.

FOOTNOTE: This was written before, and without prior knowledge of, Professor Paul Moon's open letter, signed by the likes of Bob Jones and Geoffrey Palmer, expressing concern at intolerance of free speech on university campuses.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

I know what you’re all thinking. Lord, spare us any more
comment on the SAS-Afghanistan controversy. But please bear with me here.

Yes, I think there should be an inquiry. But I have to hold
my nose as I write that, because I don’t trust Nicky Hager. There are a number of reasons for this.

He insists on calling himself a journalist, but all the
journalists I’ve worked with made it their business, before bursting into print
with damaging allegations against anyone, to seek a response from the person or
persons accused.

This is called balance, and although it has become
unfashionable in certain quarters it remains a fundamental principle of fair
journalism.

Hager doesn’t bother with balance. He and co-author Jon
Stephenson didn’t approach the Defence Force for its side of the story before
publishing Hit & Run.

This is consistent with Hager’s previous modus operandi. I
don’t think he gave Cameron Slater a chance to respond to the claims made in Dirty Politics either, or Don Brash when
he published The Hollow Men.

He likes to get in first with a king hit. It’s much harder
for someone to fight back when they’re sprawled on the canvas with the wind
temporarily knocked out of them.

Hager would probably argue that the reason he doesn’t
approach the subjects of his books is that it would give them an opportunity to
obstruct publication, possibly with legal action.

But newspapers take that risk every time they run a
potentially damaging story about someone. It doesn’t stop them seeking comment
from the people or organisation they’re about to take a whack at.

Certainly there’s a danger that the aggrieved party will seek an injunction against
publication, but I believe there are other reasons Hager why doesn’t give his
subjects a right of reply.

The first is that his story would be undermined if there
turns out to be a compelling counter-narrative. Better not to take the chance.

Another is that by publishing before his subjects have a
chance to respond, and getting saturation media coverage (as he routinely
does), he establishes a huge psychological advantage. His victims are
immediately in the position of having to come from behind.

Is Hager’s tactic of launching his books just in time to
make the TV news, thus allowing no time for journalists to seek contradictory
comment (and this after tantalising the media with high expectations of a
scandal), part of this strategy?

Very likely, although it should be pointed out that early
evening is the standard time for book launches. In any case, you could say it’s
just clever marketing. Perhaps there’s a bit of shrewd capitalist lurking in
the crusading left-wing author.

My other reason for not trusting Hager is that he has an
agenda. I’m suspicious of people with agendas, because they tend to frame their
narratives to align with those agendas.

To put it another way, there’s a danger that the agenda,
rather than the facts, will dictate the narrative, and that any facts that
don’t conform to the agenda will be ignored.

In Hager’s case, the agenda can’t be neatly summarised, but
it’s there. It can be broadly categorised as an antipathy toward, and distrust of, “the
establishment”, capitalism and authority in general.

He seems convinced that those in power are constantly
plotting to deceive and mislead the people. That theme runs through all his
work. I’m not sure that such a pessimistic mindset leads to reliable
conclusions.

So given that I don’t trust Hager, why do I think there
should be an inquiry? Well, partly because I don’t much trust the Defence Force
either.

I suspect they resent outside scrutiny. This may explain why
they seem so bad at dealing with it. The military is an insular institution,
not accustomed to having to explain itself to others. And like virtually all bureaucracies, its natural instinct when under attack is self-protection.

Besides, the NZDF has previous form. Several years ago,
disgracefully, it tried hard to discredit Hager’s co-author Stephenson – a journalist for whom I have some respect – and ended up paying him a settlement in order to
avoid a $500,000 defamation action.

In this latest case the NZDF came suspiciously late to the
party with a story that was intended to shoot Hager down in flames, but which
succeeded only in muddying the waters and creating more doubt and confusion in
the public mind.

The only way to clear this mess up now is with an open and
independent inquiry that would clarify matters once and for all. To quote the poet John
Milton: “Let truth and falsehood grapple; whoever knew truth put to the worse,
in a fair and open encounter?”

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.